The Stupid (And The Deadly) Was Strong In These Ones

Give points to Uncle Ruslan — And are we sure yet that he's really their uncle? Did anyone, you know, check? — because he called it early. The Brothers Tsarnaev were a pair of losers. As the days go by, we learn more and more that what we were dealing with here, as deadly as their actions were, was a plot by the Wayne and Garth of terrorism, a couple of guys who could screw up a two-car funeral if you spotted them the hearse. Mother Jones helpfully lays out exactly how strange this pair really was. This is, perhaps, my favorite.

The second bomb exploded at 2:49 p.m. last Monday. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan carjacked a Mercedes at 10:39 p.m.* on Thursday. What did they do in the interim three days? Go to the gym, check in on their busted car, and, in Dzhokhar's case, go to a party on the UMass-Dartmouth campus. During the three-day window in which their involvement was unknown, they made no attempt to flee.

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The whole party-animal aspect of this thing is flatly bizarre. Today, Ray Kelly, the police commissioner in New York City, and no bowl of orchids himself, explained that the brothers were headed to his town, not to commit acts of Jihad but, rather, to get down with their bad selves.

Kelly said Wednesday that investigators believe, based on interviews with the younger brother, that they weren't coming to New York City for additional attacks, and were coming to celebrate. "There was some information that they may have been intent on coming to New York, but not to continue doing what they were doing," Kelly said.

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So, for three freaking days, and even when they're completely off everyone's radar, and when they could have gotten away completely clean, they don't blow town. Instead, the younger one hits a kegger at his college and then, when everyone on earth is looking for them, they hijack a car to try and get to Manhattan for last call? At this point, I'm surprised that they didn't hang around Watertown Square and wait for Entertainment Tonight to show up.

Look, I lived through this. I'm not minimizing what these murderous idiots did up here and, as far as I'm concerned, the surviving brother can celebrate Arbor Day in Pelican Bay for the rest of his life. But every little detail that's emerging about the brothers goes a long way toward defusing the OMIGOD MOOOOOSSSSLLIIIIIMMMMMM CALIPHATE JIHAD!!!! hysteria in certain precincts of the media. The history of this country, alas, is replete with bloodshed inflicted on the innocent by rage-blinded misfits. Some huge acts of mass murder inflicted by the angry and the lost have vanished from history almost entirely. (Google "Andrew Kehoe Bath Michigan" some time.) The fact that we now have a frame made largely of unreasoning fear and reflexive xenophobia doesn't change that. Losers can kill people as easily as winners can, and ennobling the actions of a couple of bloodthirsty square pegs by draping those actions with vast, geopolitical significance is a bigger disservice to their victims than laughing at the two of them is. Let them be ridiculed. Let them be tried. Let them be convicted. Let us then not hear of them again. But let them be ridiculed first. It's healthy.